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Friday, April 25, 2008

Tutorial for Photo Blending Options in Photoshop

Ever wonder how people get that incredible depth and definition on their photos? What about how they get the background of a picture to disappear? Well, there are MANY ways to go about this, but a GREAT way to accomplish this is to use your blending modes. Although it is a "trial and error" procedure and may vary with each photo, once you learn the basics you can simply click until you are happy with the result. Here is what our photo will look like in the end on a scrapbook page:

1.) Choose your photo and drag it onto a New Document. In this example, I changed the photo to black and white, but you can use this technique for color photos as well.

2.) Right-click on your photo layer and choose Duplicate Layer. Then pull down the drop down box for the blending modes (should be defaulted to Normal) and choose Screen. (You will notice that your photo will now appear lighter and brighter.)

3.) Now duplicate your Screen layer and change that blending mode to Overlay. (Note: if nothing else, these 2 layers set at these blending modes will give most of your black & white photos and a lot of your color photos incredible depth and defintion as you can see below.)

4.) Now, click on your top photo layer and while holding down your shift key, click on your bottom photo layer to select all 3 of them. Then right click somewhere on one of the layers and choose Merge Layers. Once you have one layer, right click on it and again duplicate your layer. This time, change your blending mode to Hard Light.

5.) Last one... duplicate it one more time and change the blending mode to Screen. Now, in this case, this virtually eliminates the back ground and gives her a wonderfully contrasted and sharp appearance.

6.) Again, merge your photo layers together. (Be sure you merge only your photo layers together and not all of your layers. You will still need your "background" layer in order to edit your photo further.)7.) Use your eraser tool to erase any remnants of the background. In this case, I will also make my image larger by choosing my Move Tool and grabbing one of the corners of the photo and while holding down my Shift key, dragging my mouse out to enlarge it. I will also move my image all the way over to the right until I like the positioning of it.

11.) Now, in order to get the text off of her (since this is not truly an extracted image), just choose your Eraser Tool and, making sure the layer with text is active, simply erase any text on her. (Note: The end result will have a much cleaner look and appear as if it's going behind her if you zoom in and even erase the little pieces of text on her hair and other small details on the photo... it sounds scary, but it's really not... it only took a couple of minutes!!!)

12.) Now choose your text tool and type your title at the top and that's it! You're done!!!! Again... here is our finished layout:

******I'd LOVE to know what you think of this tutorial!! Feel free to leave comments! Also... if you have any questions regarding this tutorial, you can certainly email me at taylormade8330@yahoo.com with PHOTO BLENDING TUTORIAL as the subject. Thanks!!!!

Great tutorial Amanda!!! I get asked this a lot too so now I can direct them here!! I haven't really used blending to "extract" like this And yours is so cool I have to go find a picture and try one just like yours! AND the word art OH MY AWESOME!!!

I am so excited about this tutorial! It's awesome! I am terrible at extractions (partially due to lack of patience/tools) so I will definitely try this technique! And I adore typeface so I like that you combined it together. Thank you so much! I'm so glad I followed the link from Shaui!

This was great - thanks so much. I guess it works best on a photo where the subject is darker than the background?Didn't work at all on the pic I tried - it had a dark background. But I liked how it looked with the colors more vibrant half way through! I look forward to having another go.

Thank you so much, this was an easy to follow tutorial with great results! Here's a link to my layout using your fantastic instructions! Jenhttp://www.elementalscraps.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/47269/cat/500/ppuser/5445

This is a great tutorial! I didn't get quite the crisp look that you did though...the girls shirt is so black, was it originally black? Could it be the quality of the photo because my camera isn't that great. Any tips would be helpful!

This is one of the best tutorials I have seen. I love the fact that you aren't keeping your techniques a secret (like you see so often in the digi world for some reason). I am really impressed and I'm going to be back here often!

Thank you so much for all these wonderful tutorials! Here's a link for a LO I made using this tutorial http://redmanfamilynews.blogspot.com/2008/07/i-love-you.html I'm not sure if her eyes look right?! Thanks again, Jodie

I ready this tut. when you first did this and played a bit, but it was more for the photo effect than the LO - and now I'm coming back to it again for the LO aspects - amazing. Thanks so much. I appreciate everything you do from your LO's to your tuts to your great freebies!